Chris McCaw, Marking Time @Yossi Milo

JTF (just the facts): A total of 21 black and white photographic works, framed in black and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the East and West gallery spaces. All of the works are made up of gelatin silver print paper negatives, consisting of between one and thirteen panels. Individual panels range in size from 5×4 to 40×30, and each of the works is unique. The images were taken between 2009 and 2012. A monograph of this body of work was recently published by Candela Books (here). (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Chris McCaw’s photographs turn away from the traditional shutter-click decisive moment and measure time in much longer and more extended intervals. Using antique papers and custom built cameras, he patiently traces the path of the sun across the sky, mixing scientific precision with age-old elemental wonder. As the hours pass, the images overexpose and eventually burn, leaving seared holes and charred browned edges as evidence of something not only pleasingly visual but verifiably physical.

McCaw’s works have the feel of experiments, starting with a calculated journey to some far off locale and ending with a trial of endurance between the artist and the sun. Depending on the location, the camera angle, and the special event (equinox, eclipse, etc.), the solar movements manifest themselves as variations of arcs and curves slashing across the sky, grounded by ghosts of mountain ranges or softly reflecting seascapes. At the equator, the sun streak is completely vertical; up above the Arctic Circle, the 24 hour line follows an undulatingly perfect up and down sine curve. When McCaw opts for intermittent exposures rather than continuous ones, the sun becomes a series of dots, like a string of ping pong balls following a controlled mathematical trajectory.

In many ways, McCaw’s approach is a throwback to the 19th century, with its paper negatives, its can-do process centrism, and its amateur astronomy. Seen from the 21st century, his works seem more like a conscious reaction to the digital revolution, a celebration of what is still timeless and mysterious in this world. Even today, the strength of the sun is too much for our unprotected eyes to take in. McCaw’s cameras show us the patterns and flows of things we can’t otherwise see, the elegant scorched edges and burned scars reminding us of forces much larger and more powerful than ourselves.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show were priced between $5000 and $42000, roughly based on size and number of panels. I use the past tense since nearly all of the works were already sold when I visited the gallery. McCaw’s work has not yet reached the secondary markets, so gallery retail is the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

Letha Wilson @Higher Pictures

JTF (just the facts): A total of 10 photo-based sculptures, framed in white and unmatted or mounted without framing and hung against white walls in the single room gallery space. The works are either c-prints or gelatin silver prints, with additional concrete, white portland cement, wood dowel, or paint. They generally range in size from 24×17 to 28×28, with one larger column piece at 106×17. All are unique and were made in 2012. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Vistas of the Grand Tetons, the flat expanse of salt flats, the rumble of storm clouds, the wave patterns of eroded canyons, these awe inspiring natural treasures have now become the territory of landscape photography cliche. We have already “seen” them, the past masters of the medium having expertly captured these places with any number of emotions and mindsets: grandeur, reverence, joy, picture postcard banality, disappointment, anger, and even irony. But Letha Wilson’s unconventional photo-based sculptures have done something I wouldn’t have thought likely – they’ve brought tactile physicality back to landscape photography, and in doing so, have made the old tropes we’ve generally written off surprisingly fresh and immediate.

Wilson’s photographic raw material is entirely forgettable: photograms of evergreen branches, views of the Badlands, lonely plants in sand dunes and sagebrush underfoot. But her sculptural interventions are unexpected and invigorating. The black and white evergreen silhouettes are geometrically cut through and pulled back, revealing backside images in color. The rocky hills of the Badlands are interrupted by flows of rough concrete, slashing through like thick strips of sediment. The endless dryness of salt flats is covered in a thin white scrim of cement, hovering like a delicate crusted veil. And the swirls and whorls of pink canyons are twisted like a fan, the image folded again and again, but on a turning axis that mirrors the flow of the walls. Each material intrusion matches its subject, and by reminding us of its tangible presence, each manipulation enhances our experience of the land. It’s photography unafraid of its objectness, mixing visual elegance with physical, textural grit.

Wilson is yet another example of a contemporary photographer who is smartly disassembling genre boundaries. Her works find an easy structural balance between photography and sculpture, allowing her photographs to be both representative imagery and paper based things that can be cut, torn, slashed, and filled. The best of these works have an effortless combination of natural beauty and man made construction that settles into an unsteady but harmonious equilibrium. All in, a plenty promising debut.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are generally priced between $4000 and $6500, with the large concrete column priced at $18000. At this early point in her career, Wilson’s work has no secondary market history, so gallery retail is the only option for those collectors interested in following up.

2012 Trends, Newcomers, and Open Questions

As the third and final installment of my 2012 summary (top New York shows and venues are here and here respectively), I think it’s worth trying to take stock of the important new ideas that emerged during the year. For the most part, these themes did not come from the blockbuster retrospectives or the obvious big name shows, as these crowd pleasers tend to reinforce what we already know. Instead, they came from the fuzzy front edge of the medium, as expressed by first solos, out of the way galleries, and eclectic group exhibits, where boundaries are being challenged by fearless newcomers (however defined). Using a handful of shows as examples, I’ve teased out a few patterns that I saw coalesce out of the swirl of innovation and noise this past year. My goal here is to take an on-the-record snapshot of my preliminary conclusions at this point and time, so that we can look back in a few years and measure whether this data was actually pointing where I thought it was. At a minimum, I hope these themes will be a starting point for putting an analytical framework around some currently amorphous areas of photographic exploration.

Software is the Future of Photography

The digital revolution has been percolating along for the better part of two decades now, so saying that software is the future of the medium is perhaps patently obvious. But for this first time this year, I began to see a deeper, likely permanent shift in mindset, away from software as a digital replacement for an analog darkroom and toward software as a broad scale enabler of artistic expression. Of course, photographers have been playing with the features of Photoshop for years now, so what I’m getting at is more of a wholesale rethinking about the process of photography, and how software is now inextricably woven into that artistic endeavor, so much so that we’re beginning to see more photographic art that is truly software driven, rather than camera driven.

A few examples to illustrate my line of thinking. John Houck’s Aggregates start with purpose-built code used to output complete sets of color combinations, which cover large sheets with striations of abstract pattern (review here). He then folds the sheets and repeatedly rephotographs them, mixing images of folds and actual physical creases into layers of illusion. The works are photographic, but rooted in the mind of an engineer. Artie Vierkant’s works live entirely in the realm of software, building up geometric forms and colored gradients into overlapped abstractions (review here). His thinking finally breaks down the age old idea that there is one best copy, putting a machine cut, physical manifestation and an electronic file on the same footing. Melanie Willhide pushes the expected perfection of digital photography to the point where the glitches start to emerge (review here). Her images stutter and jitter with unexpected, uncontrolled digital bugs and greebles. And Alfred Leslie has taken the white space of the paint program seriously, using his talents as a painter and the features of the software to reconsider digital first painterly input (review here). His works use layers of flatness and detail in completely new visual combinations.

My point here is that we must begin to better understand, define and embrace the connection points between contemporary digital photography and computer-based, network and software-driven digital art making. I expect that these two mediums are going to continue to bleed together, and that photography will ultimately evolve to absorb the new functionality. Photography has always been a technology driven medium, so our collective attention needs to move to where the action is – it’s the software and how it is changing the way artists think.

Appropriation is Underdefined

My second light bulb-over-the-head revelation of this past year is that we are lost in a deepening muddle of “appropriation” without a map to give us a sense for what is really going on. If we look back at the Pictures Generation, appropriation was generally defined as taking photographic imagery from magazines, newspapers, and to some extent television (the media of the day) and repurposing it, relying on the change of context to bring out underlying meaning. It often mixed an inherent critique of media with irony and conceptual wit.

Fast forward to today and we’re still using the word appropriation to help explain contemporary digital image reuse, and I’m coming to see this as a definitional disaster. First, we need to end the debate about whether digital appropriation is or is not photography or even artistic in some way. It is. Full stop. Move on. Second, we need to broaden the definitions of what we mean when we use the word appropriation, mostly because our problem is only going to get exponentially worse with continued digitization of everything in sight. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I think there is an important difference to be clarified between appropriation that is driven by undermining the image’s original context and appropriation that is purely digital raw material for a new downstream artistic effort; one is predicated on friction while the other is essentially frictionless. We also now have dozens of media sources, from surveillance cameras and space satellites to archive digitization and family snapshots, each with differing levels of machine and human intent and widely divergent sources and uses. Seung Woo Back’s reuse of random flea market photographs (review here) and Doug Rickard’s mining of the Google Street View database (review here) need to be defined separately and with more useful granularity. I think this is the single most important semantic problem we now face in contemporary photography, so let’s collectively find richer ways to define image reuse, as it will inevitably become a larger and larger part of how we think about the medium.

The Slow End of Flatness

My last insight from 2012 is that the sculptural properties of photography are finally being explored with more innovation; the boundaries between the two mediums are gradually becoming less distinct. I’m not referring to straightforward photographs of sculpture, but to thinking about photography in three dimensions rather than two. I marveled at Sigrid Viir’s constructed frames with jutting cantilevers and rolling wheels (review here) and at Kate Steciw’s addition of tape, stickers and other objects adhered directly to the photographs and frames (review here). This thread of thinking is moving away from traditional flatness and instead building up surface and playing with photography in space, not as a gimmick, but as a reconsideration of how we experience imagery. Perhaps we can also see this as an inevitable reaction against the tyranny of the ubiquitous flat screen, and a desire to interact with photography in a more physical way. While this idea has been slowly gathering steam for a while now, I’m definitely ready for more complexity and risk taking in this area.

Overall, I think my key takeaway from 2012 is that the trends are now being driven from edges of the medium back into the center, and the only way to see the new patterns is to get right out to the boundary lines and peer over the edges. While there will always be time for appreciating the greatness of our masters, we are witnessing a time where the entire landscape of photography is in chaotic flux. I for one plan to get out to more off the beaten path galleries this coming year to make sure I don’t miss the action.

Top Photography Venues in New York in 2012

In the annual battle for venue dominance in the New York photography world, there were two clear winners: the International Center of Photography and eclectic, evolving diversity. While the ICP re-cemented its position of strength with a consistently engaging year of photography programming, perhaps the more exciting development of 2012 was the emergence of the Lower East Side as viable, energetic cluster for photography viewing.

As a reminder, these statistics are built using simple arithmetic, adding up the total number of rating stars I awarded to shows at a particular venue throughout the course of the year. This approach rewards both quality (in the form of 3 STAR shows) and consistent quantity (a solid program of 1 STAR shows month after month) in relatively equal measure. The one kink in the hose comes from venues (both galleries and museums) that support multiple viewing spaces that are filled simultaneously; this scale gives these “bigger” venues an advantage in terms of having more opportunities to show us something brilliant. Caveats aside, I do think the numbers provide a pretty accurate reflection of the past year’s best places to enjoy superlative photography.

I reviewed a total of 159 photography shows at 93 different venues in and and around New York in 2012, awarding a total of 204 stars to these exhibits large and small. The International Center of Photography took home 12 stars, besting its rivals by a meaningful margin. It was the only place in the city to deliver two 3 STAR shows (Weegee and Apartheid) and 7 different exhibits at the museum received at least a 1 STAR rating. As a benchmark for the ICP’s overall quality this year, last year’s winner, Pace/MacGill Gallery, won with a tally of 8 stars. And the ICP’s well earned triumph comes against much stiffer competition this year – MoMA, Howard Greenberg Gallery, Yancey Richardson Gallery, and Janet Borden all posted a total of 8 stars or more.

While the data compiled below doesn’t include any Lower East Side galleries (none brought in at least 2 stars in aggregate), the emergence of the neighborhood as a location worth visiting for photography was undeniable. Two or three years ago, I reluctantly trekked down to the LES once or twice a year and often came away underwhelmed; at this point, the LES is fixed into my itinerary every two weeks or so. I reviewed worthwhile 1 STAR photography shows at no less than 12 different LES venues in the past year and my crazy tracking spreadsheet has 60+ LES venues that I’m watching for signs of intermittent photographic life. With the recent moves of Sasha Wolf Gallery and Foley Gallery to the neighborhood and the continued conversion of storefronts into risk-taking young galleries, I expect things will continue to heat up. As Chelsea becomes more brittle and corporate, the LES is picking up the mantle as the place for the fresh and unexpected. Virtually all the new (or new to me) spaces I visited for the first time in 2012 were located in and around the LES.

The complete 2012 venue data set is below, with gallery name, followed by total number of review stars earned over the course of the year (including only those 40 venues with a sum total of 2 stars or more):

Specialist Photography Galleries
Howard Greenberg Gallery (here): 9
Yancey Richardson Gallery (here): 9
Janet Borden (here): 8
Yossi Milo Gallery (here): 7
Aperture Gallery (here): 5
Higher Pictures (here): 4
Edwynn Houk Gallery (here): 4
Pace/MacGill Gallery (here): 4
Bonni Benrubi Gallery (here): 3
Steven Kasher Gallery (here): 3
Bruce Silverstein Gallery (here): 3
Danziger Gallery (here): 2
Robert Mann Gallery (here): 2
Walther Collection (here): 2

Contemporary Art Galleries
Pace Gallery (here): 6
Gagosian Gallery (here): 4
Marian Goodman Gallery (here): 4
Sonnabend Gallery (here): 4
Lehmann Maupin (here): 3
Team Gallery (here): 3
Flowers Gallery (here): 2
Gladstone Gallery (here): 2
Sean Kelly Gallery (here): 2
Luhring Augustine (here): 2
Matthew Marks Gallery (here): 2
Metro Pictures (here): 2
Mitchell-Innes & Nash (here): 2
Von Lintel Gallery (here): 2
Winkleman Gallery (here): 2
David Zwirner (here): 2

Museums
International Center of Photography (here): 12
Museum of Modern Art (here): 9
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (here): 5
Metropolitan Museum of Art (here): 5
Yale University Art Gallery (here): 3
Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (here): 2
High Line (here): 2
Katonah Museum of Art (here): 2
Neue Galerie (here): 2
Wadsworth Athaneum (here): 2

Top Photography Shows of 2012

Art criticism comes in many forms and guises: academic, obtuse, snarky, long winded, analytical, fawning, nitpicky, snappy, even soaring once in a while. But regardless of its style and trappings, at its root, art criticism is pure unadulterated reaction, a conscious process of looking, seeing, thinking and finally ordering and recording. It is a public dialogue between artist and viewer, a matching of influence and response, an attempt to connect and communicate.

I’ve often thought about what my personal criteria for a great photography show might be, and whether there is some kind of framework or system that can be created to handle the nearly infinite diversity of artistic expression found in the medium. Over the years, I’ve come to see that such questions are exercises in structured self delusion; as much as I might like to classify and organize, there isn’t any right answer to be found. Quality is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, and while training and experience certainly form a foundation for making informed judgments, in the end, a review is a reasoned opinion, nothing more, nothing less.

One thing I can testify to is that great photography shows have an undeniable feeling of transcendence. At least for me, I never wonder about whether a show should be rated 2 STARS or 3 STARS. It’s never close, up for discussion or subject to persuasion or analysis; it’s always patently obvious. Every time a show merits 3 STARS, I stand in the middle of the exhibit and I gaze in circles, warmed by the physical flush of endorphins running through my bloodstream – it’s absolutely a feeling rather than any scholarly cerebral thought. And like a junkie chasing a high, I wander the galleries and museums of our city month after month looking for my next fix. In 2012, I visited 300+ photography shows (between 4 and 12 most weeks on average) and I found this tingling feeling a sum total of 8 times. A quick calculation tells us that my hit rate was less than 3%, so I might have done better looking for needles in haystacks.

The shows and exhibits below run the gamut from vintage to contemporary, from gallery to museum, from black and white to color, from analog to digital, and from single body of work to career retrospective. In short, there is no pattern. If you follow the links to the original reviews, you will be able to trace my original train thought in each case (the “why” of each rating), tracking my questions and conclusions and parsing my reactions and logic. But even many months later, the elemental 3 STAR glow of these particular shows is wholly undiminished in my brain; that physical rush clearly carves a deep rut in my memory. So while the countless others I saw last year have already begun to slowly wash away into the fog and I eagerly look ahead to what might be discovered in 2013, these 8 remain fresh, alive and durably astonishing.

Top Photography Shows of 2012 (all 3 STARS, alphabetically by last name/exhibit title)

Robert Adams, The Place We Live @Yale University Art Gallery (original review here)

Richard Avedon, Murals & Portraits @Gagosian Gallery (original review here)

Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective @Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (original review here)

Lee Friedlander: Nudes @Pace Gallery (original review here)

Gerhard Richter, Painting 2012 @Marian Goodman Gallery (original review here)

Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life @International Center of Photography (original review here)

Cindy Sherman @Museum of Modern Art (original review here)

Weegee: Murder Is My Business @International Center of Photography (original review here)

A Tuning of the Formula for 2013

The windswept beach, the cresting waves, the melting warmth of the sun, they’re all a fleeting vacation memory at this point. Frigid temperatures, driveway ice, and rock hard snow have welcomed me back to a new year of writing about photography, and a bracing, fresh-eyed, skepticism has got me wondering about the nature of this never-ending dance with our favorite medium. With the benefit of some suntan lotion covered reflection, I’ve got some changes cooked up for this blog. Nothing major exactly, but a tweak to the formula to liven things up. Otherwise, we’ll all end up glassy-eyed and bored, frantically looking for something else.

Over the past few years, the terrain of this site has slowly but undeniably narrowed to a heavy dose of structured reviews of gallery and museum shows of photography in and around New York. This specialization has made managing the blog very straightforward, as it’s allowed me to stay laser focused on one kind of thinking/writing and to refine that approach without being otherwise distracted. At this point, I see shows and crank out reviews with a scary kind of military precision. (If you’ve ever seen my eye straining 400 line spreadsheet of current shows in the city, you’ll know that I’m not exaggerating too much with that analogy.) But this blindered method has crowded out lots of other potentially worthwhile photo-related ideas, mostly due to the constraints of the fixed amount of time that I can reasonably devote to this volunteer endeavor. It’s a zero sum game of available hours, and by forcing myself to write only reviews, I have effectively limited the size of my play space.

But ruthlessly churning out reviews, however well-crafted and thoughtful, leaves too much other intriguing stuff unconsidered. So I’ve decided that the best way to keep the reviews from getting stale and rote is to do less of them, thereby freeing up some mindspace and hours for thinking about other aspects of the world of photography. And so with a sweep of my keyboard, I’m preemptively eliminating roughly 25% of the reviews I plan to do this coming year. For context, I did 159 individual reviews in 2012, so we’re talking about 40 plus reviews not happening in 2013. If we make the assumption that I’ll still see and review all of the 3 and 2 STAR shows I would have written about normally, we’re talking about killing off a meaty cohort of 1 STAR shows. My hope is that this winnowing process will keep me on my toes and force me to really think hard about which shows truly merit a review, and perhaps make the 1 STAR rating something gallery owners and photographers hate just a little less (since it will be all that more scarce). And if the spirit moves me and a show really earns it with its astonishing flameout, I may yet unsheathe the mythical 0 STAR rating.

With roughly one day free each week (one of the reviews I would have written having now been eliminated), I plan to do two things. First, I plan to get back to reviewing photobooks again. Honestly, I’ve missed it, as there are plenty of books worth taking about that aren’t directly associated with a concurrent New York show, from museum catalogs from far off exhibits to independently published small runs. One new twist though is that I will only review books that I purchase with my own money. When I did photobook reviews before, I felt like I became trapped by the siren song of free books. I came to see that it was one thing to review a valuable book you had been given for free and quite another to plunk down $75 bucks for that same thick tome. So this time, I’m going purist – no review copies or freebies; if I review a book, you will all know that I actually consciously shelled out the cash to add it to our library. I think this better supports the publishers and authors/artists, and more accurately reflects the hard choices we photobook enthusiasts with limited budgets are forced to make.

Second, I’m going to start writing a column of sorts, longer essays that roughly run the length of a New York Times Op-Ed piece (plus or minus 800 words). These pieces will not dive into the specifics of a particular show, but will tackle many of the issues (large and small) that surround photography, from collecting and the art market, to the impact of changing technology and the coalescing of trends. Ironic types might say I am going meta. I used to think that someone out here on the interweb would eventually ask the questions I wanted to hear discussed or at least mentioned, but sadly, at least so far, I was wrong; perhaps this is a function of being an entrepreneur, investor and collector rather than a working photographer, gallery owner, or museum curator – my mind seems to be wired differently. In any event, using this longer form approach (and working on my craft as a writer in the process), I’m going to dig in and see what I can swirl up. I’m either going to be the guy who has timidly raised his hand and finally asked the question you always wanted to ask, or the jackass in the back row who has burdened the entire class with his annoying, tangential ramblings. Either way, I plan to have some fun and hopefully spark some broader and more analytical photographic debates.

So next week, I’ll begin with the various summaries of 2012 and then move on to the new crop of shows, with a sprinkling of books, essays, and my usual one-off diversions into relevant art fairs, auctions, and other marginalia added in for good measure. My goal is to have the new mix be more uneven and eclectic, with less room for boring, too nice reviews of expected, forgettable shows, and more space for ideas worth wrapping your head around.

Echoes of Silence: Philip Trager, Early Photographs, 1967-83 @NYPL

JTF (just the facts): A total of 84 black and white photographs, framed in black and matted, and hung against grey walls in two separate hallway galleries on the third floor of the library. All of the works are gelatin silver prints, made between 1967 and 1983. No physical dimensions or edition information was available on the wall labels. The exhibit also includes a wooden case containing four of Trager’s photobooks. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Philip Trager’s early photographs are remarkably straightforward and unpretentious. Executed with a pared down, unassuming formalism and combined with a touch of New England reserve, the images draw from Walker Evans’ lyric documentary style and extend it in quiet, more personal directions. The pictures remind us of the value of consistent craftsmanship and win us over with their modest precision.

The photographs in this show span a wide range of subject matter, from Connecticut towns and New York city landmarks, to cactus abstractions, intimate nudes, and architectural details from Paris, Barcelona, and San Francisco. Mansions in Norwalk, row houses in New Haven, and downtown buildings in Hartford are all seen with a familiar frontal Modernism, tracking repeated geometries, flanking trees, and salt box simplicity. Trager’s New York pictures capture icons like the Guggenheim, the Flatiron building, and the Cathedral of St. John the Divine with measured grace, and close in on overlooked city details, like a swirl of stone steps, a series of vaulted arches, and a group of zig zag of fire escapes under a Chock Full o’ Nuts sign. His fascination with the nuances of architecture extends into the 1980s, where he tackled the stately campus of Wesleyan University and the linear strata of Frank Lloyd Wright’s houses.

Seeing these pictures was a reminder for me that we have largely moved beyond this kind of old school rigor these days. The crispness of vision here is tempered by attentive gentleness, not overly exaggerated by conceptual frameworks or self-referential styling. Looking back, it’s as if the sound has been deliberately turned down, so we are forced to look more closely.

Collector’s POV: Since this is effectively a museum show, there are no posted prices for the works on display. Trager’s work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up. The artist is represented by Fahey-Klein in Los Angeles (here) and prints are also available directly from Trager at the website below.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
Features/Reviews: New Yorker (here), Wall Street Journal (here)

Echoes of Silence: Philip Trager, Early Photographs, 1967-83

Through February 17th

New York Public Library
Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street
New York, NY 10018

After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age @Met

JTF (just the facts): A group show consisting of 85 photographic/video works made by 20 different photographers/artists, variously framed and matted, and hung against white walls in a single room divided space on the museum’s second floor. The works span the period from 1982 to 2010. Physical dimensions and edition information were not provided on the wall labels. (Installation shots at right.)

The following photographers/artists have been included in the exhibit, with the number of images on view and details in parentheses:

Jonathan Anderson and Edwin Low (1 inkjet print, 2009)
Nancy Burson (1 gelatin silver print, 1982)
Kelli Connell (2 chromogenic prints, 2006)
Nancy Davenport (2 chromogenic prints, 2001)
Kota Ezawa (1 chromogenic transparency, 2004)
Filip Dujardin (1 inkjet print, 2009)
Joan Fontcuberta (1 chromogenic print, 2005 )
Tom Friedman (1 chromogenic print, 1998)
Debbie Grossman (16 inkjet prints, 2010)
Beate Gutschow (1 chromogenic print, 2000)
Matthew Jensen (1 set of 49 chromogenic prints, 2008-2009)
Craig Kalpakjian (1 silver dye bleach print, 1999)
Maria Marshall (1 video, 1998)
Osamu James Nakagawa (2 inkjet prints, 2008)
Robert Polidori (1 chromogenic print, 2007)
Matthew Porter (1 inkjet print, 2010)
Bradley Rubenstein (1 inkjet print, 1986)
Thomas Ruff (1 chromogenic print, 2000)

Jason Salavon (1 chromogenic print, 2009)

Comments/Context: As a bookend to the much larger Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop show across the hall (review linked below), the Met’s photography curators have drawn together a sampler of contemporary work from the permanent collection that brings the manipulation story into the present, highlighting how the introduction of more powerful software tools has impacted the medium. There is no particular stated thesis or analytical narrative to this show; it’s a fence-sitter, offering both evolution and revolution without taking sides or picking winners. But the “one of each” example approach does have its own implied conclusion: that these new tools have opened up lots of new artistic freedoms and that profound (and continuing) change is going on in many simultaneous directions.

In many ways, the modern answer to the question of why manipulate is breathtakingly simple: “why not, when we can do so so easily?” This starts with works as seeminngly straightforward as Robert Pollidori’s image of Varanasi, where stitched together digital negatives allow the artist to pack more information into a single, still plausibly truthful frame, and ends with countless imagination stretching digital fictions, like Filip Dujardin’s impossible architecture and Beate Gutschow’s fabricated landscapes. Digital composites are a recurring theme here, running the gamut from Nancy Burson’s facial composite of 1980s era world leaders based on their nation’s percentage of warheads to Jason Salavon’s visual average of every portrait by Frans Hals. The Internet-based appropriation trend is represented by a pixelated nude by Thomas Ruff and a series of flared suns drawn from Google Street View by Matthew Jensen. And others are using the new tools to upend our expectations in more subtle and unexpected ways, like Kelli Connell’s doppelganger double portraits and Debbie Grossman’s all female remixing of Russell Lee.

As one might expect, this show leans toward the more conservative edge of the digital realm, leaving out the wilder, more exotic and more experimental edges of contemporary photographic manipulation, especially as it bumps into the fuzzy edge of what we might call digital art. But as a coda to the larger historical show next door, it certainly fulfills its purpose of providing a contemporary reference point, allowing curious viewers to trace the threads from the past all the way into the swirling digital chaos of the present.

Collector’s POV: Since this is a museum show, there are obviously no posted prices for the works on display. As such, I will dispense with the usual discussion of prices, secondary market history, and gallery representation for this review.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

DLK COLLECTION review of companion exhibit Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop (here)

After Photoshop: Manipulated Photography in the Digital Age
Through May 27th

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

Edward Burtynsky @Howard Greenberg

Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop @Met

JTF (just the facts): A group show consisting of roughly 212 photographic works made by 126 different photographers, variously framed and matted, and hung (or displayed in cases) in a series of five connecting rooms on the museum’s second floor. The works span the period from 1846 to 1993. The exhibit was curated by Mia Fineman, and a catalog of the exhibit has been published by the museum (here). Unfortunately, no photography was allowed inside the exhibit and the Met press office was unable to provide any installation shots, so there are no installation images for this show.

The exhibit is divided into sections with the following titles:

Picture Perfect
Artifice In the Name of Art
Politics and Persuasion
Novelties and Amusements
Pictures in Print
Mind’s Eye
Protoshop

The following photographers/artists have been included in the exhibit, with the number of images on view and details in parentheses:

Exterior Walls

William Henry Jackson (1 gelatin silver print with applied media, 1913)
John Paul Pennebaker (1 gelatin silver print, 1933)
Grete Stern (1 gelatin silver print, 1949)
Carleton Watkins (2 albumen prints, 1867)
Unidentified (1 salter paper print, 1865)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print with applied color, 1915)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1920)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1930)
Unidentified (2 gelatin silver prints, 1956-1957)

Room 1

Owen Angel (1 album in case, 2 albumen prints displayed, 1880)
James William Bailey (9 albumen prints, 1880s)
Edouard Baldus (2 salted paper prints, 1851, 1855, 1 waxed paper negative, 1851)
Matthew Brady/George Barnard (1 albumen print, 1865)
Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi (1 albumen print, 1866)
Levin Corbin Handy (1 gelatin silver print, 1902)
William Henry Jackson (3 albumen prints, 1881, 1906)
Robert Johnson (in case, 2 books, 1913, 1930)
Calvert Richard Jones (1 paper negative and 1 salted paper print, 1846)
Gustave Le Gray (3 albumen prints, 1856-1857)
John Murray (1 waxed paper negative with applied media and 1 albumen print, 1862-1864)
Charles Negre (1 salted paper print, 1850s)
William Notman (4 albumen prints, 1877, 1880, 1881, 1888)
Paolo Salviati (1 albumen print with applied color, 1880s)
Albert Sands Southworth (1 daguerreotype with applied color, 1850)
Albert Sands Southworth/Josiah Johnson Hawes (1 daguerreotype, 1850s)
Raimund von Stillfried/Kusakabe Kimbei (1 albumen print with applied color, 1870s)
Unidentified (in case, 1 ambrotype with applied color, 1860)
Unidentified (2 albumen prints, 1861-1865)
Unidentified (1 albumen print with applied color, 1870)
Robert H. Vance (in case, 1 ambrotype with applied color, 1855)
J.I. Williamson (1 salted paper print with applied color, 1882)
George Washington Wilson (1 albumen print, 1857)

Room 2

Ernest Eugene Appert (4 albumen prints, 1871)
Dimitry Baltermans (1 gelatin silver print, 1942)
Arthur Batut (5 albumen prints, 1885-1887)
Anne W. Brigman (1 gelatin silver print, 1912)
F. Holland Day (1 platinum print, 1907)
Louis Ducod du Hauron (2 albumen prints, 1888-1889)
Francis Galton (2 albumen prints, 1877, 1883)
John Heartfield (1 gelatin silver print collage, 1935, 1 photogravure, 1935)
Lewis Hine (1 gelatin silver print, 1913)
Heinrich Hoffman (2 gelatin silver prints, 1937)
John L. Lovell (2 albumen prints, 1887)
Barbara Morgan (1 gelatin silver print, 1937)
Francis James Mortimer (1 carbon print, 1917)
Herbert George Ponting (4 gelatin silver prints, 1927)
Mikhail Razulevich (1 gelatin silver print, 1933)
Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1 carbon print, 1851, 1 albumen print, 1860)
Henry Peach Robinson (3 albumen prints, 1857, 1858, 1860)
Camille Silvy (2 albumen prints, 1858, 1858-1980)
Edward Steichen (1 gum bichromate print, 1902, 1 platinum print with applied color, 1904)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1914)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1916)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1949)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1964)
Weegee (1 gelatin silver print, 1968)
Alexsandr Zhitomirsky (1 gelatin silver pribnt, 1941)

Room 3

Richard Avedon (1 gelatin silver print collage, 1967)
Ralph Bartholomew Jr. (1 carbro print, 1957)
Barthelemy (1 albumen print, 1870)
Erwin Blumenfeld (1 gelatin silver print with applied color, 1949, 1 magazine lithograph, 1950)
William Robert Bowles (1 gelatin silver print, 1900)
Claude A. Bromley (1 book, 1941)
Frank Roy Fraprie/Walter E. Woodbury (1 book, 1931)
Maurice Guibert (1 gelatin silver print, 1900)
J. Halstead (1 albumen print, 1865-1877)
Edwin T. Hamilton/Ralph Sommer (1 book, 1938)
J.C. Higgins & Son (1 albumen print, 1870)
K. Himmelreich (1 gelatin silver print, 1910s)
Albert A. Hopkins (1 book, 1897)
Amos Mallen (1 gelatin silver print, 1865-1870)
William H. Martin/George B. Cornish (9 gelatin silver prints/chromolithographs, 1910s)
Richard C. Miller (1 carbro print, 1941, 1 magazine lithograph, 1941)
William H. Mumler (6 albumen prints, 1862-1875)
Horace W. Nicholls (3 gelatin silver prints, 1906)
Howard S. Redell (1 gelatin silver print, 1930)
Oscar Gustave Rejlander (1 albumen print, 1871)
Unidentified (1 daguerreotype, 1855)
Unidentified (in case, 1 stereoscopic albumen print, 1856)
Unidentified (1 tintype with applied color, 1865)
Unidentified (1 albumen print collage, 1870)
Unidentified (1 albumen print with applied color, 1875)
Unidentified (1 albumen print, 1880)
Unidentified (1 albumen print, 1880s)
Unidentified (1 cyanotype, 1890)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1899)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1903)
Unidentified (2 gelatin silver prints, 1905)
Unidentified (in case, 1 gelatin silver print, 1907)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1910s)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1910s)
Unidentified (8 gelatin silver print postcards, 1910s)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1920)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1930)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1949)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1950)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1953)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1954)
Unidentified (1 gelatin silver print, 1960)
Weegee (2 gelatin silver prints, 1952-1959, 1959)
Weegee/Gerry Speck (1 book, 1964)
John Wolters (1 gelatin silver print, 1936)

Room 4

John Baldessari (1 set of 4 gelatin silver prints, 1976)
Herbert Bayer (1 gelatin silver print, 1932)
Bill Brandt (1 gelatin silver print, 1956)
Claude Cahun (1 gelatin silver print, 1929)
Will Connell (1 gelatin silver print, 1937)
Yves Klein/Harry Shrunk/Janos Kender (1 gelatin silver print, 1960, 1 newspaper, 1960)
Clarence John Laughlin (1 gelatin silver print, 1947)
George Platt Lynes (1 gelatin silver print, 1935)
Frank Majore (1 inkjet print, 1987)
Angus McBean (1 gelatin silver print, 1949)
Duane Michals (1 set of 7 gelatin silver prints, 1968)
William Mortensen (2 gelatin silver prints, 1930, 1932)
Dora Maar (2 gelatin silver prints, 1936, 1940)
Ann Rhoney (1 gelatin silver print with applied color, 1982)
Martha Rosler (1 chromogenic print, 1967-1972)
Jim Shaw (4 gelatin silver prints, 1978)
Frederick Sommer (1 gelatin silver print, 1946)
Grete Stern (1 gelatin silver print, 1948)
Maurice Tabard (1 gelatin silver print, 1930)
Jerry Uelsmann (2 gelatin silver prints, 1969, 1976)
Oliver Wasow (1 dye transfer print, 1987)
Wanda Wulz (1 gelatin silver print, 1932)

Room 5

Kathy Grove (3 gelatin silver prints, 1989-1990, 1990-1992, 1993)
Boris Mikhailov (1 gelatin silver print with applied color, 1975)
William Wegman (1 set of 6 gelatin silver prints, 1972)

Comments/Context: In the past twenty years, and with the continuing ascendance of digital technologies, we have come to reluctantly accept the notion that photographs of all kinds are routinely manipulated. This slow change in cultural mindset has been an extremely rough road, and even today, we are still fooled (and therefore outraged) by our trust in the truth of the photographic image. We have grudgingly learned to know better, and many of us have become savvier consumers of media, but that doesn’t mean we are entirely happy about the rules of the new world we live in.

Part of the sense of violation that manipulated photographs seem to embody comes from the fact that they are contrary to everything we have been taught that is right and good about photography; they’re cheating somehow, and we’re not so secretly angry that folks aren’t coloring inside the lines. This is why Mia Fineman’s thoughtful show is so important – it’s a kind of watershed moment of revisionist history. Looking back from our knowing perch of manipulation run amok, she has picked out the overgrown trail of fakery and fabrication that reaches all the way back to the origins of the medium. It’s been there all along, of course, but it just didn’t fit the rigidly orthodox view of straight photography as the be all and end all, and was therefore marginalized and largely forgotten. In a certain way, this show is the anti-Beaumont Newhall, a history of photography where manipulation is just as valid and creative as straight photography, and extra crisp “truth” is just one of many styles that a camera-toting artist might decide to employ.

While this exhibit is roughly chronological in flow, it’s structure is mostly driven by a succession of answers to the question of why photographers were modifying their pictures; it’s a rational analysis, not out to score points, but designed to provide a logical, step-by-step progression of justification and proof. The first answer to why is largely a technical one – photographers resorted to manipulation when the existing tools failed them in one way or another. Overexposed skies were a common problem: Carleton Watkins and Gustave Le Gray both combined negatives to get the right clouds above the right land/sea scapes, while John Murray simply blacked the sky out with India ink and Edouard Baldus painted the clouds in or jigsawed negatives together. Group portraits also posed difficulties – multiple negatives allowed missing participants to be added in later or separate details to be combined; in one portrait, Ulysses Grant, a horse, and a background battle scene are combined into a single heroic image. Given a lack of color, many photographers also resorted to hand coloring or painted extras to give their images a more realistic or pleasing look.

The next answer to why seems to have been a more purely artistic one. Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach Robinson created wholly staged/combined tableaux, following their own interests in allegorical scenes and controlled emotional settings. Simple retouching and painting in soon gave way to full blown Pictorialism and its emphasis on hand crafted modifications; two examples from Edward Steichen show the pinnacle of this kind of hand applied finishing. In the same room, a third manipulation answer is proposed: political propaganda and falsification. This collection of images includes anti-Fascism collages, Lenin and Stalin retouched, Chairman Mao smoothed to perfection, and composite views looking for the “essence” of criminal faces, diseased bodies and French regional groups.

The next room contains perhaps the simplest and most obvious answer to why photographers altered their images: to entertain. There are several copies of the same man in a single image, lots of severed heads, a woman riding a moth, plenty of ghosts and spirits, and various fantasies, from oversized produce to Times Square under water to the stork bringing a baby and the Mona Lisa frowning. These outright fabrications then give way to more journalistic/advertising examples, executed in halftone printing: derby crowds in the rain collaged together, a dirigible parked at the tip of the Empire State building, mushroom clouds, a woman in a champagne glass, and doctored Saturday Evening Post covers of Thanksgiving dinner. Richard Avedon even gets in on the action, with a fashion shot of Audrey Hepburn with five heads. Crossing into the next gallery, Surrealism comes to the forefront, with Dora Maar’s curved floor, Wanda Wulz’ cat face, and William Mortensen’s fingers driven into eye sockets. In these images, nothing is as expected, from a two headed Claude Cahun to a multi-armed Brandt nude.

Inexplicably, the rigor and logic that held the preceding thematic sections together so tightly falls apart at the end of this show. In the final rooms, manipulated photographs from roughly 1950 to 1990 are left to roam freely, without so much as a whisper of a connecting framework. Yves Klein jumping into the void is mixed with Jim Shaw’s before and after aliens, while Martha Rosler’s soldiers in the kitchen compete with Jerry Uelsmann’s mysterious levitating trees. Boris Mikhailov’s garish May Day Parade sits across from Kathy Grove’s erased Satiric Dancer, their relationship completely unfathomable. I sorely missed some kind of clear parsing and unpacking of this later period; it felt like a monumental missed opportunity to chart a path through more recent (and arguably more complex and conceptual) manipulation strategies.

If this show had ended with Surrealism, I would have almost certainly given it my highest rating, as it takes some risks and teaches us something new. As hung, however, I am forced to take it down one notch. Fineman does an admirable job of reconsidering photographic history and explaining the whys of early photographic manipulation, but the last gallery or two left me wanting something more in terms of a continuing analytical thread. I hate to say it, but once again, a comprehensive, thoughtful, well researched Met photography show has lost its way after 1950. I’m not sure if this is a function of the balance of permanent collection or the mindset of the curators, but it’s happened too many times not to be some kind of pattern.

But I quibble. Overall, congratulations are in very much in order for bucking the established orthodoxy and offering a credible alternate history of the medium. Photographic manipulation clearly has a long and storied history, and Fineman has deftly provided us with a plausible framework for connecting the ever more complicated fabrications of the present with the long arm of the past. More work is needed to clarify recent developments, but I’m certain this will end up being a first choice reference baseline for future investigations.

Collector’s POV: Since this is a museum show, there are obviously no posted prices for the works on display. As such, I will dispense with the usual discussion of prices and secondary market history for this review.

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Features/Reviews: NY Times (here), Wall Street Journal (here), New York Review of Books (here), Time LightBox (here)

Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop
Through January 27th

Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10028

Auction Results: A Show of Hands: Photographs from the Collection of Henry Buhl, December 12 and 13, 2012 @Sotheby’s

The results of the Buhl collection sale at Sotheby’s earlier this week were marked by a mix of highs and lows. On the high side, the Total Sale Proceeds covered the Total High Estimate, and new auction records were set for Herbert Bayer, El Lissitzky, Lee Miller, Peter Hujar, and Helen Levitt, with additional records for photographs by Man Ray and Gabriel Orozco. There were lots of positive surprises, and more than 38% of the lots sold for above the estimate range. On the low side, the Buy-In Rate of nearly 35% was quite high, meaning that many of the more esoteric and unknown hand pictures failed to find buyers. All in, probably about what we might have expected for such a broad collection.

The summary statistics are below (all results include the buyer’s premium):

Total Lots: 432
Pre Sale Low Total Estimate: $8119600
Pre Sale High Total Estimate: $12157500
Total Lots Sold: 281
Total Lots Bought In: 151
Buy In %: 34.95%
Total Sale Proceeds: $12318704

Here is the breakdown (using the Low, Mid, and High definitions from the preview post, here):

Low Total Lots: 270
Low Sold: 166
Low Bought In: 104
Buy In %: 38.52%
Total Low Estimate: $1560500
Total Low Sold: $973329

Mid Total Lots: 116
Mid Sold: 78
Mid Bought In: 38
Buy In %: 32.76%
Total Mid Estimate: $2387000
Total Mid Sold: $2046500

High Total Lots: 46
High Sold: 37
High Bought In: 9
Buy In %: 19.57%
Total High Estimate: $8210000
Total High Sold: $9298875

The top lot by High estimate was lot 33, Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O’Keeffe – Hands and Thimble, 1919, at $800000-1200000; it sold for $770500. The top outcome of the sale was tied between lot 12, Herbert Bayer, Lonely Metropolitan, 1932, at $300000-500000 and lot 20, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Fotogramm, 1925, at $300000-500000; both sold for $1482500. (All three images are displayed in the preview post, linked above.)

82.21% of the lots that sold had proceeds in or above the estimate range. There were a total of 37 surprises in the sale (defined as having proceeds of at least double the high estimate). Normally, these would be enough to hold our attention, but within this group, there were a total of 8 extreme surprises (defined as having proceeds of at least triple the high estimate); these are listed below:

Lot 9, Man Ray, Mannequin Fatigué, 1926, at $314500 (image at right, middle, via Sotheby’s)
Lot 47, Edward Weston, Charis at Lake Ediza, 1937, at $62500
Lot 82, Gabriel Orozco, Mis Manos Son Mi Corazon, 1991, at $278500 (image at right, top, via Sotheby’s)
Lot 178, Georges Hugnet, Arms and Canal, 1936, at $28125 (image at right, bottom, via Sotheby’s)
Lot 180, Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim at the Printing Wheel, 1933, at $98500
Lot 344, Kenneth Josephson, New York State, 1970, at $11250
Lot 424, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nude Self-Portrait, 1973, at $43750
Lot 427, Larry Gianettino, Blood Finger (AKA Self-Portrait in Blood), 2000, at $8750

Complete lot by lot results can be found here.

Sotheby’s
1334 York Avenue
New York, NY 10021

Joel Meyerowitz, 50 Years of Photographs, Part II: 1976-2012 @Howard Greenberg

JTF (just the facts): A total of 43 color photographs, framed in white and variously matted/unmatted, and hung against light brown walls in the main gallery space, the book alcove, the back transition gallery, and the smaller side viewing room. All of the works are either chromogenic or archival pigment prints made between 1976 and 2011 (most are from the 70s and 1980s); the show includes a mix of vintage and modern prints. Physical sizes range from 8×10 to 51×40 (or reverse). No edition information was available for the vintage prints; edition sizes for the modern prints are variously 5, 10, 15, or 20. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: This second part of the Joel Meyerowitz gallery retrospective begins with the late 1970s period when color itself became the primary subject of the artist’s work. Looking back, we now think of this time as the innovative heyday of American color photography, and this selection of images makes a compelling case that Meyerowitz was right in the thick of things. As he slowly traded the streets of New York for the beach communities of Truro and Provincetown out on Cape Cod, his pictures settle down a bit, no longer chasing the chaos of a cinematic city scene; they move more deliberately, waiting for the right light conditions that would produce the color effects he was now interested in.

The last few New York images on display here all primarily play with color as a compositional tool. A glowing red neon sign is balanced by the green tinge of a New Jersey neighborhood street light. The sliver of the Empire State Building is offset by the rich afternoon light on an orange storefront, punctuated by a dancer in a bright green dress. A spinning lobby Christmas tree is transformed into a conical electric rainbow. And the soft pink of a bathtub becomes a study in color gradations and shadows.

Meyerowitz’ photographs from the Cape seem even slower, where the buzz of yellow neon reflects across a wood sided station wagon and car doors are aimlessly left open revealing saturated red warmth against the dark purple twilight. Dusk seems to have been his most productive time of day, when the changing tones of cotton candy pink, burnt orange, and periwinkle blue could be captured through the railing of a porch, over a swimming pool, near the light of a telephone booth, or simply at the beach looking out to sea. His daytime pictures of cottages are more formal, using the scallop of a roofline to decorate the disorienting view to the ocean through a rectangular hallway or interleaving the lattice pattern of a rose trellis with its own shadows in the punishing midday sun. A side room of beachgoers stand at attention near the water, prefiguring Rineke Dijkstra’s famous images but with a more casual, easygoing, summertime mood.

Aside from the shattered blue of an extra large Hockney-esque swimming pool pattern, most of Meyerowitz’ recent works are executed in a more subtle and subdued palette. The skulls and tin cups of Cezanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence sink into tactile grey, a warehouse butchery in Tuscany wallows in muted reds and browns, and the twinkling light streaming through early morning cypresses washes everything to silhouetted black and white. The color is now soft, worn, and understated.

In general, as with the first part of the survey, I think this second part has been well chosen, mixing instantly recognizable photographs with lesser known rarities. While there are gaps in the story and the recent work is less memorable, the selections from the 1970s and 1980s certainly show Meyerowitz’ artistic progression and clarify his evolving approach to the medium. Across these two exhibits, we’ve been given a smart and thorough retrospective of Meyerowitz’ long career, with plenty of highlights to burnish his reputation.

Collector’s POV: The works in the show are priced between $10000 and $26000. Meyerowitz’ work is routinely available in the secondary markets, particularly prints of his 1970s images made in large editions (75 or even 100). Prices have typically ranged from $1000 to $14000, mostly on the lower end of that range.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

Artist site (here)
DLK COLLECTION review of Part I of the exhibit (here)
Joel Meyerowitz: Taking My Time, published by Phaidon (here)

Joel Meyerowitz, 50 Years of Photographs, Part II: 1976-2012

Through January 5th

Howard Greenberg Gallery

41 East 57th Street

New York, NY 10022

Sign up for our weekly email newsletter